Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

(36)
23
SIZE is a SCALAR-PHYSICAL-OBJECT-ATTRIBUTE, with the term ‘scalar’ used here, as it is customarily,
in the sense of ‘gradable.’ Big is, of course, our typical adjective; red may be less typical, but
it is certainly common, and it is convenient to look at them both together: two for the price of one,
as it were. What makes red less typical is that its scale is not gradable: COLOR is just a PHYSICAL-
OBJECT-ATTRIBUTE, missing the SCALAR attribution, because its scale consists of a finite number
of discreet and incomparable entities. Both scales are presented here as properties of physical objects
(the concepts are, of course, not ambiguous while the English words size and color are), which
constitute its domain.
Each numerical scale can be measured in actual measuring units, such as LINEAR-SIZE in feet,
yards, or millimeters, or TIME in seconds. But often natural language expressions do not refer to
absolute magnitudes but rather to abstract relative ones, as in the case of big. We assume a 0 to 1
numerical range for such abstract scales. For abstract references to size, the fillers in English can
be as shown in (37):
(37)
0 minuscule small medium-size big enormous
gigantic 1
Big will, then, get something like a ‘> 0.75’ value on the SIZE scale (38) and red the ‘red’ value on
the COLOR scale. These values are a crucial part of the lexical mapping (LEX-MAP) included in the
semantics (SEM-STRUC) “zone” of their lexical entries. Equally crucial is the syntactic-semantic
mapping between the syntactic-structure (SYN-STRUC) and SEM-STRUC zones with the help of special
variables (many zones which are actually present in the entries for these adjectives in the MikroKosmos
lexicon are omitted from (38)-(39)).
(38) (big (big-Adj1(CAT adj)